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Saturday, April 01, 2006

Blue Beetle

On a whim, I picked up DC's new Blue Beetle #1. I love the design for the costume of the character, as well as the art I glimpsed while flipping through it, courtesy of Cully Hamner. Beyond that, I knew nothing about the character, let alone the mythology behind the powers the new character had inherited. I was a little wary of the advertised "From the pages of Infinite Crisis" splashed over the front cover (given that I know pretty much nothing about the DC universe), but I took a chance and picked it up nonetheless. After all, I did check out Manhunter with no prior knowledge and I'm a big fan of the DC book now. I did have some problems with Blue Beetle, however. I could certainly follow what was going on, but I was left a little confused, as the hero did speak of events from...yeah, Infinite Crisis. From what I get, there was some big superhero tussle that the Blue Beetle was involved in, but something went wrong (maybe?) and now the superheroes hate him and are fighting him. I'm assuming the Blue Beetle was always a good guy and when the mantle passed onto this boy, Jaime wasn't able to control it or was confused or something. A little back story wouldn't have hurt here. Other than that, I really enjoyed the comic. The art, like I said before, is beautiful. I favored the civilian scenes to the big galactic superhero scenes, but Hamner certainly did a competent job on the fights as well. I really like the main character Jaime. He's pretty cute...you know, for a comic book character. Heh. And I liked how he interacted with his friends and family. It was all very well done. I just hope that some of my questions are cleared up as the story progresses. For all I know, maybe I'm not supposed to know anything about this big battle and the explanations are forthcoming. As it is, I have no idea. But in the end, small qualms aside, I definitely did enjoy it enough to pick up the next issue.

2 comments:

Welcome to the DC Universe! Actually, you are not supposed to know why everyone hates the new Blue Beetle as this occurs at the end of Infinite Crisis which has not come out yet. So you know about just as much as anyone. If you want to know more about the history of the blue beetle character I suggest looking up Blue Beetle on Wikipedia. Check out my blog, I reviewed this issue too!